As Hugo Barra, former vice-president of Android product development at Google Inc, heads to China to oversee the global expansion of smartphone firm Xiaomi, Silicon Valley's relationship with the world's largest smartphone market is growing ever tighter.

"It is a terrific company," Barra described his new employer at the annual China 2.0 investment conference at Stanford University last week.

Barra said the most notable characteristic of Xiaomi is that its product is completely user-centric. "If you're on the data branch, you get software updates on your phone every week; if you're on the stable branch, you get software updates every month. You don't see that very often in this ecosystem," he said.